QUOTE(HotKnife420 @ Sep 7 2009, 02:56 AM)
Ok, I'm with you on most of that, but a few things I'm still pondering:
A) Cost - I believe your figures are outdated/wrong for manufacturing costs. I can goto Disc Makers and get 1,000 replicated DVDs for under $1/ea (no additional costs except shipping). I don't see what's stopping MS (or more likely, a developer wanting an earlier/better review) from spending a couple thousand bucks for something like that.
It costs a lot more to bring an Xbox 360 game disc to production. I didn't go into detail, but just to get an image signed, you are talking about considerable engineering time... these are high level people in Redmond, not offshore resources in India... it may seem stupid that it would "cost" a couple of engineers a day or two to sign an image, but there is more involved, including generating the "master image" and testing.... because... it then costs additional money to master a disc. This isn't a quick and easy "bake it and ship it" duplication operation. Every Xbox 360 game disc has special security features stamped into it. This doesn't come as cheap as a simple DVD-ROM. They are made in a particular factory, tightly controlled by Microsoft for security and quality control reasons. Just the cost of pressing an individual disc is more expensive, AFTER the initial mastering costs are figured in.
You comparison is about as valid as me comparing printing a PDF of a magazine, to what it costs to bring a limited run of that magazine off of a printing press. There are considerable "up front" costs involved before a single disc gets pressed - and that costs is usually absorbed by pressing thousands of discs. The cvost, per disc, goes up DRASTICALLY, as the numbers go down. The up front costs are several orders of magnitude higher for stamping a security-features-laden game disc, even forgetting quality and security issues.
For many reasons, only a handful (and I literally mean that you can count them on your fingers) of trusted reviewers ever get "alone time" with dev builds. Most previews are conducted in house with supervision by developers to explain bugs and shortcomings away so what should be a nice exercise in PR work doesn't turn into a disaster in the press. **IF** Microsoft or a publisher wanted to ship out a preview edition, it would only be in quantities of less than 10, at most, to a very, very selective audience.
Economically, it would make more sense to ship unsigned preview copies burned onto DVD-R and accompany them with review/test consoles, considering the limited number of reviewers that would actually be given an advance, incomplete build of a game.
It's about the scales of the economy of game disc production. It's just not worthwhile to ship a signed, stamped dev build. It never will be, even if it was ever deemed OK to ship untrusted reviewers a dev build to begin with.
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2) Your arguement about pissing off the devs makes a valid point - it's gonna get uploaded anyway, so why not upload a "trojan ban magnet"?
- Because pirates are more interested in getting the game free/bootleg than paying another $200 for a new console, $60 for the game, and them XBL membership frees
- The 'scene' is going to 'proper' it anyway, so you're not stopping piracy, you're just increasing your own unit sales to help make the installed base look larger than it is....to the developers!
- Just because these versions were identical to a dev build doesn't mean the dev didn't have it signed and pressed to send to some mags/reviewers. Within your "conspiracy theory" it seems plausible that reviewers are even encouraged to flash their drives and are sent their "review copies" on a burned disc (short runs - cheaper cost), and those particular ones were leaked.
Please, put down the bong and re-read what you've just posted, then re-read what I posted.
A dev build on a burned disc is easy enough to do. It's either unsigned (and no threat to release on the internet, since it's useless on retail consoles) or if you sign it - it's going to have to have the media flag set to "DVD-R" media, which the two releases last year did not have. If you released a signed game media flagged for DVD-R, it would be all over the net in a heart beat, but more importantly, it would be HUGE news - remember the kiosk demo disc? That will NEVER happen again. Unsigned code is worthless to people with hacked consoles.... the game will simply not run unless you have an exploitable, chipped Xenon (which isn't terribly useful for new games or Live play). I already outlined the reasons why you'll NEVER see a dev build on a stamped Xbox 360 game disc (though we saw the images). Reviewers are not supposed to have hacked consoles, either, so no... sending a signed DVD-R to be used on a hacked console is not going to happen, either.
As for "proper" releases - how many people trusted them? Honestly, the pirate community isn't as large as the industry makes it out to be, and Microsoft knows this, or enforcement would wind up the scene community so tight they'd all move over to the Wii and give up on the Xbox 360. They do the bans about once a year, calculated to strike a bit of FUD into the scene. Databases of offenders are built, bans randomly distributed (some get off) to throw off efforts to track the cause. Because of that FUD, when something like Halo ODST comes along, and people start getting banned, and Major Nelson drops vague hinst that they "know" how to tell copies from originals (it's complete BS, they certainly know who's playing a LEAKED copy, though), people freak out and decide, at least for now, to go legit.
This latest antic only strengthens the case - they've moved on to perma-banning accounts. It's the next step in enforcement EXACTLY BECAUSE pirates sell those banned consoles on eBay and get new ones. This increases the FUD and reins in those people who don't want to risk their accounts just to play a AAA game a few weeks early. Spreading the idea that now (after 3 or 4 years??!) that they have a foolproof way to tell copies from originals (a ridiculously untrue statement) will make quite a few converts.
How many pirates are going to touch Halo ODST until after it's released now? I am willing to be a lot of them are willing to pay the money to buy the game when it comes out, rather than risk their Live accounts (or have mom and dad buy the game, rather than risk telling dad that he can't watch netflix because they got the family Live account permabanned)... or even just to play the game ASAP, instead of waiting for a "proper" they feel they can trust. Given the bad rips that have made it to the scene, I don't think there is a single release group that can claim to be foolproof, either.
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d) The bigger "ban games" (according to a few threads on these and other forums at the time) were two other "major" games. To clarify - retail versions, two differeint "groups", and one got people banned and reason seems to be that it was a bad rip (go figure)
There certainly are bad rips. What does that have to do with what were OBVIOUSLY not retail builds of games? Bad rips can be detected, and Microsoft will continue probing the edges of the firmware hacks to see how they can, without netting innocents, find people using backups and punish them. It's a war, and wars are won and lost on information and disinformation, especially this one. Somebody finds an exploit, they hold that card close to the vest until they actually need it.... because once it's revealed, Microsoft will respond and close it. When methods are developed to determine somebody is running hacked firmware, Microsoft will figure out ways to inject the check into their consoles in ways that make it hard for hackers to spot and counteract.
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Topic: Major Nelson Tweets About Halo ODST Bans *Update: MS Detects Copies?* (Read 2081 times)